The Cincinnati Bengals ran their “Oklahoma” drill Sunday, head coach Marvin Lewis’s traditional kickoff for their first training-camp practice in full pads, and it was once again a hit among spectators and the players looking on. This year, the NFL Network aired it live, and former players gushed nostalgically about its physical and psychological benefits—how it makes one’s body and mind tougher.

Chris Nowinski heard about it a day later, and was much, much less excited.

“It’s a reasonable drill,’’ he said Monday from Boston, where he is co-founder of Boston University’s Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy. “Part of the question, though, is how much repetition of it there is.’’

Nowinski—who played football at Harvard and wrestled professionally before concussions drove him out of competition and into scientific research and advocacy—questions the drill because it means more times for a player to absorb a hit, and more chances for the brain to endure impact and suffer trauma.

They’re a fast track to concussions and, in many cases, degenerative brain diseases like CTE, which Nowinski and his colleagues have found in several deceased athletes who had donated their brains for study.

The Oklahoma (one blocker, one tackler, one ball carrier going full-speed in a confined space) is one of many such drills that have been used for generations, at every level of football from the NFL down to Pop Warner—and can, and should, be eliminated, in his opinion.

“That one’s not the worst one. That, at least, is a game-like situation,’’ Nowinski said, adding, “Some of the others they still use—lining two guys against each other, four or five yards apart, no ball, no blocker, slamming into each other with a running start, with no real purpose. It’s not even about winning a one-on-one. It’s just about slamming into each other.’’

Three years ago at a medical conference on athletic head trauma in Waltham, Mass., Nowinski told the attendees that at every level of football, "We can have a way to reduce the number of hits in the head from 1,000 to 300, tomorrow.'' He showed them video of several time-honored one-on-one drills, including the Oklahoma, and said of them overall, "I say eliminate that. It's a dumb drill.''

His criticism of the Oklahoma itself is more restrained—it “should be used sparingly”—but he did note that few, if any, other NFL teams use it at all anymore, which he sees as progress. Even with that, he pointed out, doing it on the first day in full pads might not be wise: “I don’t know if everybody’s in the right shape to do it.’’ Which, again, can lead directly or indirectly to head injuries.

More progress, Nowinski said, has come from the NFL’s new limits on hitting and workouts in pads during the offseason and training camp. Still, he warned against getting too emotional about the sight, sound and feel of a drill like the Oklahoma.

“One of the things about football is that it’s easy to make an assumption based on evidence that isn’t there,’’ he said. “You have a losing team, you hit hard during a practice, and everybody thinks it means the team is tougher. If a team isn’t doing well, and it’s perceived as so-called ‘soft,’ people will look at practice to see proof of it.

“It’s hard to be punished by your employer for being tough on the players.’’

In this case, however, the employer may be part of the problem.

Bengals owner Mike Brown spoke to reporters last Tuesday and said about concussions: “It’s not only not proven, it’s merely speculation that this is something that creates some form of dementia late in life. Our statistics—the ones I’ve seen anyway—don’t show that … I’m not convinced that anybody really knows what concussions bring, what they mean later in life, if anything.’’

Nowinski said “about a dozen people” forwarded Brown’s comments to him. He wasn’t surprised that an NFL owner would say it in light of the financial damages at stake in the ongoing concussion lawsuits against the league by former players.

Still, Nowinski said with a sigh, “I mean, it’s disappointing. It’s incredibly insensitive to the hundreds of NFL survivors who have a type of dementia, and who know they’re suffering because of brain trauma when they were players.

“You’d hope that one day they’d look back, several years from now, and see how foolish they sound,’’ he added.